Second, she knew those eyes. Jordy’s eyes. The same vivid green, although somehow muted. Tired, she thought.
And at last came the realization. Impossibly, this was the stuffy, boring, staid Wyatt Blake.
And he was looking at her as if she’d crawled out from under the nearest rock.
Chapter 2
It was worse than he’d feared.
Wyatt stared at the young woman before him. He’d hoped, when he’d first seen the tidy, well-organized store that perhaps he’d been wrong to expect a problem here.
Play On hadn’t been here when he’d lived here as a kid. He’d heard that the woman who owned and ran it had once been in a semi-successful rock band, which had registered only as an oddity in a little town like Deer Creek. But Mrs. Ogilvie—who had been the local information center when he was a teenager seemingly in trouble at every turn, and apparently still fulfilled that obligation—told him that Jordan came here after school almost every day, he’d known he had to check it out. Especially since Jordan had told him he was studying at school. He didn’t like being lied to, especially by his own son. If this was going to work at all—and he had serious doubts about that—there had to be honesty between them.
The hypocrisy of that high-flown thought, given his own secrets, made him grimace.
“You’re the owner,” he said.
It came out more like an accusation than a question. He hadn’t meant to sound so harsh, but his thoughts had put an edge in his voice.
She said nothing, but he’d spent his life gauging people’s reactions, and as clearly as if she’d shouted it he knew he’d gotten her hackles up already. That wasn’t how he’d wanted to approach this, but damn, she looked like his worst nightmare as far as Jordan was concerned. The rock-and-roll history was bad enough, but the slightly spiky red hair that fell forward to surround a face that managed to look sexy and impish at the same time, and the slim, intricate, knotted bracelet of a tattoo in a deep bluish-green color around her left wrist finished it for him. She would be an impossible-to-resist lure for an impressionable boy.
“Well?” he said, his voice even sharper.
“Was there a question?” she asked, her tone as cool as the steady gaze of smoky gray eyes. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t easily intimidated.
He took a deep breath, and tried to rein it in. After all, she wasn’t some rock gypsy any longer, was she? She’d quit that life, so maybe there was some sense behind those eyes.
The question was, how much of that life had she brought with her here?
“Where’s the paraphernalia? In back?”
She blinked then, looking genuinely puzzled. “What?”
“The cigarette papers, the bongs, the glass pipes.”
She went very still. The smoky gray eyes narrowed as she looked at him. “This is a music store, not a head shop.”
“Right. And you never touched the stuff when you were a rock star.”
She looked at him levelly. She was tall, he thought, five-eight or so. She wore black jeans and a gray shirt that had some sort of shine to it. Unremarkable, except for the way the shift and sheen of it subtly emphasized curves beneath it.
A subtle rocker? Hard to believe, he thought.
“As a matter of fact,” she said icily, “I never did. And also as a matter of fact, I was never a rock star. I played in a band.”
“A successful one.”
“For a while.”
“And you use that.”
“Marketing,” she said. “I’d be a fool not to, if I want to stay in business in a tough world.” The practical assessment surprised him. “You have a problem with that?”
She was challenging him now.
“Only when you use it to lure in kids.”
She went very still. When she spoke, her voice held a new edge that made him wary. “Lure?”
“Sexy girl rocker,” he said. “If you’re a teenage boy there’s not many lures bigger.”
For an instant she looked startled. But her voice was no less edgy, and the edge sharpened as her words came bursting out.
“That dream died thanks to the kind of thing you’re accusing me of selling. I would no more have drug paraphernalia here than I’d cook up meth in my kitchen.”
At the fierceness of her voice Wyatt drew back slightly. Perhaps he should have done some research before he’d come charging in here. He didn’t care for the way she was looking at him. Which was odd, since he’d come in here not caring what she thought, only wanting to find out what drew his son here day after day.
“You know,” she said, “when Jordy told me his father did nothing but work and hassle him, I thought he was being a typical teenager. That his situation just made normal parenting seem like hassling. Seems I was wrong. You really are a … hard-ass.”
Wyatt had the feeling Jordan had used another word, and he noted the fact that even angry she had not repeated it. He assumed a woman who’d lived in the rock world had much worse in her vocabulary, so either she’d censored herself because she didn’t use the language with a potential customer, or because she was protecting Jordan.
Belatedly—much too belatedly—he realized that she knew he wasn’t a potential customer at all, that she knew who he was.
“How did you know?”
To her credit, she didn’t play dumb. “Please. Like there’s more than two sets of those eyes in Deer Creek.”
He blinked. He’d of course known Jordan had the same color eyes. It was one of the reasons, along with childhood pictures of each of them that could be interchangeable, that he’d never doubted Jordan was his son. He just hadn’t expected a total stranger to notice it within five minutes.
And he hadn’t wanted to tick off the one person in town that Jordan seemed to voluntarily gravitate to within that first five minutes, either. He wasn’t even sure what had set him off. There had been a time when he’d been smoother, when he’d assessed a person accurately and chosen the right approach to get what information he needed from them.
Apparently that time was long past.
“Is my son here?” he asked, not even bothering to comment on her recognition.
“He’s in back.”
His brows furrowed as he glanced at the hallway behind her. “Doing what?”
“Smoking dope.”
His gaze snapped back to her face.
“Isn’t
